April Bloomfield and Ken Friedman’s newest restaurant, inside the Pod 51 Hotel on East 51st Street, is called Salvation Burger. I can’t say that the first word of the name filled me with hope. The last time this chef and her business partner offered us salvation in a Pod hotel, they gave us Salvation Taco, a thronged taqueria designed for, and seemingly run by, people who don’t know what a taco is.

That second word was promising, though. Ms. Bloomfield definitely knows what a burger is.

There are many good things on her menu at the Spotted Pig, the first restaurant she opened with Mr. Friedman. But each time I ate there recently to see how it was settling into its second decade, it was Ms. Bloomfield’s burger I saw on almost every table, high and proud next to a tumbleweed of shoestring fries. And it’s her lamb patty under feta and onions at the Breslin that is most likely to tempt diners away from the other meaty, fatty delights.

At Salvation Burger, she zeros in on what the people want and dispenses with almost everything else. Three of the five main courses are burgers, and all five come on a bun. She also knocks out bar snacks like popcorn and beef jerky, along with salads and pies, but nobody will accuse Ms. Bloomfield of padding the menu.

The beef burgers come in two forms, highbrow and lowbrow.

Representing the former is the Salvation Burger itself, a tall, tender half-pound patty of ground beef with cheese and mushrooms on a sesame seed bun. Servers like to say this is “cooked like a steak,” but not many restaurant steaks are grilled over a wood fire. Maybe they should be. This burger combines a dark crust that has the specific flavor of charred beef with a soft interior evenly cooked to medium-rare so when you bite down, it surrenders its warm pink juices.

Slumped in a dirty tank top in the lowbrow corner is a double-decker burger called the Classic. If the Salvation Burger tastes like a steakhouse, this one tastes like America. The two patties, pancaked to a blackening crunch on the griddle, sprawl beyond the borders of the bun, running with “special sauce” and yellow cheese that works as a second sauce. Pickles are hiding inside, good ones, but everything on this burger comes together in a single impression that bypasses analytical thinking and goes directly to raw, thumping want.

The Salvation and the Classic would seem to cover the twin poles of burger lust, but for those who aren’t moved by beef, Ms. Bloomfield makes a vegetarian patty of carrots and lentils threaded by clear vermicelli of sweet potato starch. The spices are Indian and the effect is excellent; it is not a meat substitute but a very flavorful concoction in its own right.

Whether you want the fried fish sandwich depends on whether you can be content with the taste of tartar sauce while everyone around you is wiping beef fat from their lips. That the sauce is whipped up in the kitchen probably won’t be the deciding factor either way, just as knowing that Ms. Bloomfield is turning Cheddar into a facsimile of American cheese won’t be a huge consideration for those who want the Classic. (The kitchen’s motto could be “simple food the hard way.”)

The house-baked buns, on the other hand, do make a difference. The top-split roll with a Parker House flavor is a major contributor to the all-around excellence of the oversize hot dog that runs with juices like an Italian sausage when you break its seared skin. Buried under a spicy confetti of giardiniera, the hot dog is this restaurant’s sleeper.

At $14, will it become a hit? The $25 price on the Salvation Burger doesn’t seem to have hurt it, even though fries cost another $7. (These sagged with oil the first time I tried them, but stood up straight as Popsicle sticks on later visits.)

I couldn’t warm up to the incongruous combination of sweet cocktail sauce and garlic butter on the wood-roasted oysters, but I’d come back again just for Salvation Burger’s rich and bittersweet chili, made with the shanks from the sides of beef that are broken down and aged in the kitchen, on their way to burgerhood.

For dessert, what else but pie? The standard pies still need work. The crusts are both too thin and too soft, and the ones with a thick dairy layer, like the banana cream pie with translucent banana chips stuck into its surface like armor, aren’t as creamy as they should be. Far more appealing are the fried pies, golden rectangles filled with apples or blueberries. All they are missing is a wax-paper envelope to pick them up with. They taste better when you eat them with your hands.

Even with dessert and a wait for a table, a meal at Salvation Burger won’t swallow your entire night. This isn’t the case at the Spotted Pig. The crowds haven’t thinned appreciably since the place opened in 2004, and you still can’t reserve. Once you’re finally seated, a three-course dinner can take a couple of hours. After my most-recent dinners there, I left thinking that there had to be more rewarding ways to spend the evening.

One time, my party of four was quoted a 90-minute wait. We passed the time at an extremely pleasant cocktail bar down the street, Orient Express. When no text had come through after an hour and a half, one of us went back to check. “You’re looking at another 45 minutes,” a host said. No apology, no smile. In fact, we were seated much sooner than that, but our moods were scuffed.

Another night, another cooling-off period, another what-do-you-want greeting: Our server, when she finally noticed our table, stood next to it and said nothing. This was a little tense. Finally one of us blurted, “We’re ready to order some stuff.”

“Some stuff or all the stuff?” she asked. The servers at Spotted Pig give the impression that they are going to get up to something at the end of their shift that’s more interesting than whatever I’m going to do. This can be charming except when they seem in a hurry to get there.

When they finally let you eat, the food can be wonderful. The smoked haddock chowder is a creamy bowl of winter solace, and when it was succeeded on the menu by a minted sweet pea soup with soft shredded ham hock, I cheered for spring. I loved being reunited with an old Pig standby, the bitter green salad with lobes of lemon pulp and pigs’ ears fried to a crackerlike lightness, and I have a new appreciation for the plump mussels in a lightly sour curry that tastes of toasted spices.

But there can be a haphazardness to the cooking that wasn’t always part of the bargain. The much-praised sheep’s milk gnocchi can be gummy and dense, the chicken liver toasts can be oversweetened with reduced Port and Madeira, and a big slug of horseradish cream was so cold it cooled the skirt steak it was plopped on top of.

When the Spotted Pig was last reviewed in The New York Times, in 2006, Frank Bruni added up the pleasures and subtracted the inconveniences to come up with a one-star rating. Ten years later, the equation is slightly different, but the sum is the same.